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My heart broke the day Julian left the University of Wisconsin: 11/1/05. We were struggling to get anything out the door. An amazing technology entrepreneur (and Lisp guy!) named Greg Nuyens was trying to hold startup Qwaq together with both hands. I knew it was going to be a tough time for Croquet.
Fast forward.
I have left the University of Wisconsin Division of Information Technology to work at Qwaq, Inc. Sweet!
In this article, Linux entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth says, “We’ve started to use [Croquet] for planning and building Ubuntu.”
Linux works well. One of the hard parts with delivering on “Linux” (generically) is that there are a lot of variations. Croquet works on some combinations of kernel, libraries and device drivers, but not on others. I don’t have a Linux box myself, so I haven’t spent any time on it. (The Croquet Collaborative runs on FreeBSD, and does so as a graphicsless server.) It’s tough to be trying to accomplish something while wrestling with configuration issues.
But Plopp offers a consumer-market product on many flavors of Linux (as well as Windows/Mac), but it doesn’t (yet?) make use of the full collaborative Croquet SDK. Once it runs, it runs. I guess the Ubunto folks have got real Croquet running with their developer and business configurations, and are now starting to explore its use for doing real work.
A student of Ralph Johnson is being sponsored by Google for a summer Croquet project. Cool.
Last week, Qwaq announced Forums, its enterprise conferencing product.
Yesterday, the Croquet Consortium announced its own formation, and the availability of the open SDK 1.0.
And yesterday, Impara announced an English language and free trial version of Plopp, its kid’s sketching product.
There has been private, academic, commercial and non-profit Croquet development for a while now. Much has been internal and proprietary (and even military) and so the general public has not had a chance to see it. Less than two months ago, we cobbled up an open sample application.
Meanwhile, the folks at Qwaq have been working hard in stealth mode, building a sophisticated application and aiming to be the first clearly commercial Croquet play. Read more.
As lots of Croqueteers already know, we have FINALLY released version 1.0 (Beta) of the Croquet Software Developer’s Kit. (The Web site is new, too.) This is the first released version of the Croquet innards that does all the stuff that Croquet is supposed to do: shared simulations in spatial environments in order to achieve a collaborative build/use environment with social presence.
Being open source with a very liberal license, we expect a lot of stuff to be built in, around, and on the SDK. In particular, there’s still room for folks to define an APPLICATION that Joe-Random-User can just pick up and USE. There are plenty of working demos in this new release: they’ll be particularly meaningful to developers who play with them and the code a bit. More to come…
Everyone’s been waiting patiently for Hedgehog. There’s no way to know when the next step of David Reed’s Tea Time will be available. As David Smith and Andreas Raab began working on Simplified Tea Time for Hedgehog, there was no way to know when that process would produce results.
The Croquet group at the University of Wisconsin is not in the Computer Science department. We’re not driven by the theoretical concepts of Croquet for its own sake. We are in the Academic Technology department of the Division of Information Technology, and our interest is in building educational applications in Croquet. Adding stuff to the Croquet core is fun, but what we really need is to build learning environments with faculty. Last summer, we had the opportunity to just that, and we took it, even though we knew that the existing Jasmine proof-of-concept version of Croquet would not meet our needs. What to do?
The first real release of Croquet is nigh….
It’s been heads-down hard work around here ever since OOPSLA in October. Haven’t even filed my expense report yet. (Coding is more fun.) So I’m pretty late in posting that…
Today was my boss’s last day, and, ironically, my first anniversary. Julian Lombardi will be Duke’s Assistant Vice President for Academic Services and Technology Support. He’ll be responsible for the university’s IT customer service and development.
They made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.
